Senior Editor
James covers the intersection of commerce, media and advertising technology.
AUTHOR ARCHIVE FOR:
James Hercher
Articles By James
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App Marketers Learn From Ad Tech, Even As They Abandon Ads
Mobile apps need revenue but have limited screen space on ads. Enter Button, which lets consumers click on an icon to move easily from app to app. It collects fractional fees from its partners, like a toll road connecting different apps. “We continue to see these transactional models embraced in mobile compared to traditional advertising […]
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Rocket Fuel's Political Gambit: A Cautionary Tale for Ad Tech
Ad tech companies flocked to Washington, DC, during the recent election cycle in pursuit of political ad budgets, but many were disappointed. Rocket Fuel was the most aggressive newcomer, adding approximately 15 people to its DC office for political business development beginning last summer. But the company dismissed most of those hires in the week […]
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Facebook Jumps Out Of The Frying Pan And Into Fire With More Measurement Errors
Facebook admitted additional measurement errors Wednesday, along with policy and organizational changes meant to narrow the trust gap between marketers and the mobile world’s leading ad platform. The news comes less than two months after Facebook disclosed that it had been overstating video engagement results, prompting backlash from agencies and concern from other digital media […]
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Trump Did Have A Paid Media Strategy, And It Focused On Facebook
As many have pointed out, Donald Trump won the presidency while spending a fraction of what Hillary Clinton did on ads and technology. But his campaign had a more concrete paid media strategy than some may have realized. The Trump campaign worked with Cambridge Analytica on polling, digital media and data. The company’s head of […]
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Political Advertisers Have Discovered A Way Around Election Day Laws Thanks To Smartphones
It’s illegal to display political ads or messages, solicit supporters, hand out campaign paraphernalia or try to affect voters’ preferences in almost any way once they’re within a roughly 100-foot radius of a polling location. But sophisticated location-based mobile advertising has exposed a loophole in those laws, wherein campaigns target mobile ads to people while […]
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FastPay Expands Lending Limits For Audience-Rich And Cash-Hungry Publishers
While publishers deliver an online ad in fractions of a second, the buyer typically doesn’t pay for 90 days or more. That’s not a relationship that advantages the sell side. “You have to pay payroll right away and you have to pay supply sources right away, so there’s this working capital friction in ad tech,” […]
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Instagram Tests Product Tagging Feature To See If It Can Drive Purchases
Facebook-owned Instagram hopes its platform can drive market research and shopping. On Tuesday, the company said it will let brands tag products in in-feed images. The pilot will run throughout the holiday season with 20 select US retailers, including brick-and-mortars like J. Crew, Coach and Macy’s, as well as digital-native brands like Warby Parker and […]
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PROG I/O: Google Expands Exchange Bidding As Q3 Ad Revenue Surges
Google is seeing strong growth in its dynamic allocation exchange bidding, countering the advantages gained by other exchanges via header bidding. Six months ago, Google reversed its DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) policy when it opened the server up to third-party exchanges. Since then, it’s more than doubled the number of outside exchange partners, adding Smaato, […]
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The FCC Expands Oversight Of Internet Service Providers
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) passed a stringent set of online privacy regulations on Thursday. The law, expected to go into effect next year, expands the FCC’s mandate over internet service providers (ISPs), which will soon have to obtain individual consent to use data drawn from a subscriber’s activity, such as web browsing, app usage […]
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Snaplytics Debuts Snapchat Measurement Tool With API Workaround
Snaplytics, a third-party Snapchat measurement vendor, came out of beta Wednesday after spending more than a year developing the hardware and software needed to pull marketing insights from Snapchat accounts. “It’s not similar to fairly straightforward API analytics like with Twitter and Facebook,” Snaplytics co-founder and CEO Thomas Cilius told AdExchanger. “You need some custom […]
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Democrats Redirect Ad Dollars In Bid To Reshape Political Map
The old military saying that “generals are always fighting the last war” cautions those who are more concerned with history than with current challenges. It’s a worthwhile lesson for political spenders and media companies as the 2016 US election lurches toward an unexpected battleground map. State Of Play “So far, this election has been the complete opposite […]
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Magna Global Releases Sunny Programmatic Forecast As Ad Tech Exits Adolescence
Programmatic is growing, and it’s also growing up. That’s the message from the Magna Programmatic Growth Report released Friday. Magna projects global programmatic spend to grow from $19 billion this year to $42 billion in 2020. Non-programmatic spend is expected to grow from $27 billion this year to $31 billion, with programmatic becoming the default […]
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With Home Shoppers In Hand, HSN Looks To Expand Its Network
HSN, the broadcast network dedicated to home shoppers, is finding new digital revenue streams to support its core TV business. “We’re a marketing platform for brands we sell,” said Annemarie Frank, HSN’s VP of omnichannel marketing. “A lot of the brands we work with internally and have done well with us are looking for ways […]
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Facebook Tweaks Audience Network To Favor Advertiser Metrics
Facebook is changing the way it values ad placements across its Audience Network as part of an ongoing transition from proxy ad metrics to actual business conversions. “The dominant proxy for the industry, and it’s been true as well for us, is the click,” Facebook ad tech head David Jakubowski told AdExchanger. “[Except] no marketer […]
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WPP’s Xaxis To Acquire Triad Retail Media
Xaxis, the WPP Group-owned programmatic media platform, snapped up the ecommerce ad tech business Triad Retail Media on Thursday. Triad handles media sales for major ecommerce sites, including those operated by Walmart, Sam’s Club, eBay, StubHub, Staples and Toys R Us. Triad’s gross revenue was more than $500 million in 2015, up from approximately $170 […]
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Audience Buying Moves Down-Ballot
Democrat Karen Jacobs isn’t running any TV ads while campaigning for a state House seat in Texas. Even cheaper regional and local broadcast inventory is expensive because her squiggly district northeast of Dallas – known as one of the nation’s most gerrymandered – must hit multiple markets. The district skews heavily Republican so any TV spending would […]
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Native Programmatic’s Awkward, Growth-Spurt Years
Casie Attardi will speak at AdExchanger’s PROGRAMMATIC I/O Conference in New York on October 26. Native inventory became a significant part of the digital marketing mix before industry stakeholders had the time to develop a sense of comfort and familiarity with native advertising. “Native, especially for in-app programmatic, evolved over a very short period of time,” said […]
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Mo’ Match Rates Mo’ Problems As Cross-Device Vendors Aim For Scale
Cross-device identity match rates have shot up in recent years, but brands and agencies remain skeptical of the results. “We were consistently disappointed with cross-device identity matches,” said David Kohl, CEO of the digital media advisory firm Morgan Digital Ventures. “There’s a gap in understanding of what’s possible between vendors and the buy side, [which […]
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Horizon Turns To Digital Attribution In Pursuit Of Cinema Ticket Sales
Media agency Horizon Media worked with Placed, a location analytics and attribution firm, on both companies’ first attempt to measure the impact of digital advertising on movie ticket sales. Horizon Media is the longstanding media buyer for the production studio STX Entertainment. It has worked with Placed for other advertisers, “and we started having conversations […]
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Google Expands Free Measurement Tech For Its Marketing Cloud
Google will expand its free marketing measurement software by adding an A/B testing product (Google Optimize), a data reporting and dashboard-creation tool (Google Data Studio) and new machine learning capabilities for Google Analytics. These products will be available in an open beta starting next month. “The ultimate goal is to provide a kind of analyst […]
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Political Tech Firms Eye Commercial Market In Pursuit Of Stable Budgets
A growing number of political ad tech and data analytics companies are pitching their services to brands and agencies. It’s been a challenging election cycle for political technology firms, which have been fending off agnostic companies that see tech as fundamentally more important than partisan affiliation. These newcomers have successfully pried open budgets that were […]
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The Trade Desk Share Price Surges In IPO Debut
Now trading on NASDAQ: The Trade Desk. The demand-side platform officially IPO’d on Wednesday morning, with shares trading between $28 and $30, smashing the company’s $16-to-$18-per-share projection (which it amended upward from $14 to $16 the day before its IPO). The stock price as of approximately 3 p.m. Eastern placed the company’s market cap close […]
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Retailers Push Investments In Augmented Reality, Even As Consumer Interest Dips
While consumer interest in augmented reality (AR) has risen and fallen like a tide, retailers and tech vendors see it as more than just a passing fad. Hybris Labs, the retail tech R&D division of SAP, began working on AR products in 2013 after Google Glass debuted, said Hybris Labs team lead Christian Neeb. “There […]
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This Year’s Hotness: Finding And Monetizing Pissed Off Voters
Every year, voter-targeting firms sell audience segments based on trending issues. “We look into our crystal ball and think about what’s going to be big come November,” said Andrew Drechsler, CRO at the liberal data firm HaystaqDNA. And this year, everybody’s crystal ball is showing the same thing: voters who are willing to split or […]
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Adblock Plus Shifts Into Ad Tech With SSP Offering
Germany-based Adblock Plus (ABP) on Tuesday debuted its beta supply-side platform (SSP) offering, called the Acceptable Ads Platform. It marks the company’s first move into an ad tech space it typically criticizes. “We’ve always called the Acceptable Ads initiative an ongoing experiment,” ABP ops manager Ben Williams told AdExchanger. “We’ve improved it over time, surveying […]
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The EU Ramps Up Regulatory Action As Pubs And Advertisers Lose Ground
In the past two weeks, the European Union has further expanded the scope of its regulatory powers and revealed more zealous plans to influence competition between digital properties. In late August, the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) released net neutrality guidelines, which become law in 2018, that forbid practices like “fast lanes” […]
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The Trade Desk Amends S-1, Valued Between $550M And $600M
The Trade Desk expects a valuation between $550 million and $600 million, according to an amended S-1 filed Tuesday. The company will make 4.6 million shares available on the market, with an anticipated share price between $14 and $16. At the high end, it hopes to raise $85.9 million, compared to $86.3 million in its […]
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Ibotta Debuts App-To-App Marketplace For Mobile Commerce Partners
The shopping app Ibotta, which gives users cash back for purchases, has streamlined app-to-app buying. Tech from deep-linking vendor Button now allows Ibotta users to make purchases from apps in Button’s network, which includes Hotels.com, Groupon, Jet and Spring. Ibotta hopes to connect commerce apps into an easy-to-use marketplace. While it’s easy to link and […]
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In The Win/Lose World Of Political Advertising, Attribution Is Irrelevant
Digital ad experts are rising in the political campaign world, but digital’s unique measurement capabilities aren’t coming with them. A big part of the problem is that the nature of voting defies measurement. “On the political side, there’s only one interaction a person takes [i.e., his or her vote], and you don’t know for months […]
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Amazon Tests Data And Media Bundling As It Targets New Marketer Budgets
Despite Amazon’s legacy as a giant digital walled garden, marketers say it’s in the early stages of a major expansion into an ad platform model. Specifically, Amazon is testing ways to tie together its properties to form a more comprehensive, full-funnel offer, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the early products. Amazon didn’t return […]